Deliverable

It seems like ages since I’ve posted here. Things got busy, and to be honest I’ve just been putting it off. So, without further delay…

Check-Ins

90 Day Check-In: Sleeping in My Bed
Day 90 came and went back on September 6th and I’m happy to report that this habit seems to have successfully taken root. I associate alot of pain with sleeping on the couch now, and can’t imagine myself doing it anymore.

90 Day Check-In: No Television
Day 90 of this challenge came and went back on September 13th. I successfully avoided the idiot box for those 90 days, and though I’ve watched TV from time to time since then I don’t watch it nearly as much. This challenge really made me aware how much of a negative influence television can have on your brain. It’s such a passive activity, and so much of what’s out there is absolute rubbish. Not to mention the amount of time it sucks out of your life. I do know that I must be vigilant and not let it creep back in to my life. There is just too much else to be doing. I can’t spare the time.

90 Day Check-In: No Sugary Snacks
Kicking the sugary snack habit has been great. Again, Day 90 of this challenge came and went successfully. Saying “No” to sugary snacks for those 90 days has helped alot with saying no in the days since. I haven’t been as extreme with it in the days since, but I’ve noticed that I’m much more conscious of the sugar that I put in my body. My brain just kinda says “you don’t need that stuff anymore… It’s not good for you…”. I seem to have successfully knocked out my soda habit as well. (Knock on wood and all of that…).

30 Day Check-In: Questions
This is one of those challenges that didn’t go so well. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I didn’t keep it up for the full 30 days. It’s been a while since I started this one, but I seem to remember that about half way through the 30 days I had a bit of a breakthrough. It had to deal with wealth, and how you define it. It came after reading Paul Graham’s essay How to Make Wealth. The thing that I took from it is that essentially wealth is not money. The pertinent passage is here:

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.

Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money. [...] People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage– just a shorthand– for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

What I took from this was the answer to my question: “How did I create a million dollars doing the thing that I loved to do? I made things that people wanted and they gave me little pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents.”

Asking the question definitely got my brain moving and working but it didn’t lead to the place that I’d hoped and ultimately created more questions, which I suppose isn’t such a bad thing after all.

30 Day Challenge: Open Loops
This one was a bit of a wash-out. I was never clear enough as to what constituted an “open loop”, so ultimately this fell by the wayside. My guess is that the list of open loops wasn’t broken down into enough discrete next actions.

30 Day Challenge: Morning Pages
I remember that I started this challenge at a time when I was feeling unfocused and thought that having a goal of 30 days of morning pages would be a good thing. I didn’t complete 30 days straight, but I have been using them more regularly in the days since to clear my head. This is a tool that I believe in and that I’ll regularly revisit.

Project Challenge
I’ll cover this in a later post.

So there you have it. It feels good to put this stuff to bed.